The Summers brothers

From humble beginnings hail pure genius

Feature Article from Hemmings Muscle Machines

The week before this story was written, there was a huge party going on at Bill Summers' place in Ontario, California... He was feting the team of automotive archaeologists who had resurrected the storied Bonneville record car, Goldenrod, which he and his late brother had engineered, literally in their heads, beginning in 1964, an incredibly radical vehicle whose speed marks had stood for a generation and then some. Another party was about to follow, when the restored Goldenrod was delivered to its new owner, the Ford Motor Company, for enshrinement in The Henry Ford, the Dearborn-based complex of museums. It's a pretty good and nonpartisan endorsement of the car. Goldenrod was powered by a quartet of Chrysler Hemi engines.

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The ascension of Goldenrod to automotive icon is, in an indirect manner, a lifetime validation of the Summers brothers themselves. Perhaps more than any other individual hot rodders, Bill and Bob Summers represented Everyman to people who really cared about high performance, the ordinary guys next door who made good. Starting cold with literally nothing, the brothers went on to be land-speed legends praised widely for their innovative thinking and resourcefulness, and founded a company that still makes premium-quality driveline components that are almost mandatory for the most severe racing applications.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, the brothers' father, a salesman, moved the family west in the late 1930s while working as a salesman, first to Washington state before settling in Ontario, east of Los Angeles. There was nothing in the boys' early years to suggest what would become of them. Bill Summers got a job at a local Ford dealership, and eventually made the acquaintance of a local rodder and racer named Dawson Hadley, who had run at the Bonneville Salt Flats. That was in 1953, and it's what first drew Bill, and later Bob, to the California dry lakes and then to Bonneville. The hot-rod orbit was completely alien to their father, who still decided to buy Bill his first car, a 1935 Ford coupe.
"I saw all the cars around the area, and I began to follow it, and then I bought my second car, a 1932 Ford coupe," Bill told us. He graduated from high school in Ontario in 1953, when his brother was still a junior, and the two decided together to make an assault on Bonneville. So Bill bought yet another car, a 1936 Ford coupe, and managed to find a discarded Chrysler early Hemi V-8, which he gradually built up with parts scavenged one or two at a time from a local Chrysler dealership. This Hemi became what may have been the longest-lived powerplant in the history of American racing.
The Summers brothers made their first foray to the seemingly endless flats in 1954, an expedition that Bill curtly called, "a fiasco. The car was flat-out junk. We didn't do anything. I drove. We just camped out in the dirt. They finally let me run and I think I ran about 136 or something. The next year, we built a 1929 Ford body on a 1932 frame, and used that same Chrysler engine, and this time, we were really competitive. I ran about 178 and got first place in C/Roadster."
From that point, the brothers began to develop ever more daringly designed cars for the salt. The next one was a Model T modified roadster with the Hemi mounted amidships, and by now, with Bob Summers in the seat. He ran it past 200 mph on alcohol in 1956, then upped that record by a considerable margin the following year. Following that run of success, as Bill remembered, "Everybody started to take notice of us."
An unexpected detour into drag racing, when a friend put together a British Austin coupe that ran as a Gasser, led them to form Summers Brothers Racing, still regarded an industry leader in producing forged axles for drag and oval racing, spools and geared camshaft drives. The brothers regrouped to set another record in 1960, and discussed their futures during the long tow back to Ontario. They decided to roll some really big numbers by building a streamliner. By 1963, they'd elevated their class record to 327 mph in a front-drive streamliner powered by the same Chrysler they'd been using since 1954.
Mickey Thompson had turned an unofficial 400 mph at Bonneville in 1960 in his Challenger I, which used four big-bore Pontiac engines arranged in pairs. For a couple of seat-of-the-pants racers, Goldenrod was a stunning, revolutionary achievement. It borrowed heavily on the slingshot-dragster layout, with its four unblown Hemis laid out in line. Bill Summers hand-built wooden scale models that were tested in the Cal Tech wind tunnel. When it was built, Goldenrod, which weighed nearly three tons, had barely nine square feet of frontal area and an astonishing drag coefficient of only 0.117. As he recalled, "Bob always said it was very straight to drive, but he knew that if he ever got it sideways, it was going to be a real bad thing. When we designed it, and took the models to Cal Tech, we knew what we wanted; exactly how much horsepower we needed to go the speed that we wanted to hit."
Not only that, but the brothers, known for their quality work and loyalty, snared major sponsorship from Chrysler, Firestone and Hurst. Bob drove the needle-like Goldenrod to 409.227 mph in 1965, a record for wheel-driven vehicles that wasn't threatened until well into the 1990s.
Bob Summers died, his landmark Bonneville accomplishment still intact, in 1992 after suffering a massive heart attack. Goldenrod never raced again, but visited Europe six different times, where crowds mobbed the groundbreaking record car. Bill Summers is retired now at 70, but supervised its restoration, headed by longtime Norco, California, racer Mike Cook. More than 50 years after first chasing the horizon at Bonneville, Bill is still ready for more.
"Yeah, I'd like to get something else going," he told us during the party. "Only not yet."

This article originally appeared in the November, 2006 issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.